Welcome to the Show!
For more than 800 years the newly elected Lord Mayor of London has been rowing,
riding or marching off to the distant village of Westminster to swear loyalty to the Crown
and begin his or her year in office.

Over the centuries that journey became known as the
Lord Mayor's Show.
It has been a mediaeval carnival, a renaissance spectacle and a military parade,
and it is still the longest and most splendid civic procession in the world.

Thank you to everyone who took part in this year's Show and came to watch.
The next Show will be on
November 9th 2019
starting at 11am from Mansion House and filling the whole day with pomp, pageantry and spectacle. See you there!

The Lord Mayor’s Show is
naturally accessible and enjoyable by everyone,
and you will see many disabled people both taking part and joining the crowds to watch.
Special parking arrangements are available for blue badge holders, and the
grandstands
include spaces set aside for wheelchair users.
See our access page for maps, advice and useful contacts.

The Lord Mayor’s Show enthusiastically embraces the Shakespearean view of life, a particularly English phenomenon founded in literature by the London Poet Chaucer, and described by another London author Dickens as “streaky bacon”. By this he meant that the way we do things here is to put the comic and the tragic against each other, we do coarse and we do grandeur. We do bawdy and we do elegance. In the first two or three hundred years after his death Shakespeare was heavily criticised by Classicists especially in France for this mixture. Well, the Lord Mayor’s Show perpetuates it. There is splendour and there is a knees-up.

History

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